(Winner of the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography) Following the new president Theodore "TR" Roosevelt as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, Edmund Morris begins this second volume of his Pulitzer Prize–winning biographical trilogy with TR's journey to Washington, while the assassinated President McKinley rides behind him like a ghost of the 19th century. Traveling through a succession of haunting landscapes, TR encounters harbingers of all the major issues of the new century, including imperialism, industrialism, conservation, immigration, labor, and race. Theodore Rex (the title is taken from a quip by Henry James) tells the story of the following seven-and-a-half years, during which TR entertains, infuriates, amuses, strong-arms, and seduces the body politic into entering a new century.

"In Edmund Morris, a great president has found a great biographer.... Every bit as much a masterpiece of biographical writing as The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize."—Washington Post

"Take a deep breath and dive into Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris's sequel to his 1979 masterpiece.... He writes with a breezy verve that makes the pages fly."—NYTBR

"As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams's volumes on Jefferson and Madison."—Times Literary Supplement